Had a good weekend doing one of the most-postponed, messiest clean-up jobs ever, tidying up the split and busted cheap plastic shed in the yard at Jo's house. A big tin of spilt paint, a burst bag of compost mixed with matt paint, broken tiles, broken shelves, accumulated stagnant rainwater, and the black aftermath of the Misfiring Roman Candle Incident of Bonfire Night 2010 in which a firework fell over in its unstable bed of marbles in a plastic bucket and fired into the shed and ignited the paint. Satisfying manual labour. What us arty types need to do more often.

Really don't think this thing with Mary-Ann is going to work. Just sent her this.

[...] You divine accurately that my thoughts are preoccupied with you. And yes, I have been fencing about a little.

I often think this has got no future at all. We're too far apart, and I feel that I have a self that I present to you that isn't really how I am from day to day. A great deal is lovely - the bliss of being touched by you and touching you is something that doesn't occur in my day to day life. But there's a great deal of me that I will never be able to share with you. Dancing, drinking, long face to face conversations that can end up spontaneously in bed, cooking for you and so on. And my friends. I've always imagined that anyone I was going out with would be part of my friendship group. I know some really nice women and I'd like you to know them too. All these things are stymied by distance, a problem I wilfully overlooked because I just found you, at first, and subsequently, and now, so seductive, so literate, so different - and funny.

The lack of frequently seeing you has the unfortunate effect of making me feel that my contact with you is a bit staged, a performance of a relationship. Last night, knackered after clearing out the yard and smelling of paint and turps and with my knee playing up from too much genuflection, I went down the pub and bumped into my friends Kev and Neil and sighed with relief as we spread over the table with the Sunday papers and sat in companiable silence. And then I thought "Oh right, [I deleted the word "fuck"] I said I'd ring Mary-Ann."

And that moment made me feel sad. That's not how it should be, feeling that you've got to ring someone. It's a function of not being able to see you enough, of feeling that because of the fragility of our contact, I ought to add more fuel onto the relationship lest it wither, despite at that particular time, wanting to just have a quiet, peaceable drink.

Another worry I have is that I feel sometimes a little bit mismatched with you in terms of liking the quotidian, the meandering everyday natter, the directionless babble of consciousness. I sometimes try to please you by being a little more self-reflective in my speech, and in my commentary on the day, than I feel at that moment. I can always tell when I'm doing this because my accent, always an unstable thing, veers more towards RP than the bastardised Lancaster in which I more often talk. Again - that wasn't a problem when we were actually together, but *not* being together is going to be a constant.

I want it to work, but after a couple of pints, I doubt it.
XX

Am off to see Clint Eastwood's film J Edgar in a couple of hours with my former pupil, the rather sexy Marianna. Bit tired and would rather have a wee little lay down. Oh for the days when such lethargy would be banished with the adroit use of a mirror, a razor blade, and a short white line.

I was down the Council offices today, "normalising", in the word of the investigator who was sitting in my front room on Monday, my "situation". I had to bring present proof of my indebtedness, and confirmation that I have actually been paying rent, it being a Brian Clough arrangement (cash in envelopes, no receipts; part of me wishes we met at Forton Services to hand it over).

For proof of the former, I hardly knew which letters to select from the two-inch thick file of them on the table over there. I chose an historical and a contemporary example of the genre, both of which have [Oh fucking hell, there's been a heartfelt Balkan moan from the floor below. Stefan's probably had a wank] -- both of which have the tone of an ineffectual bully. I chose one from July 2010, saying that I will be taken to court within fourteen days and another from 30th January this year, reducing that limit to a week.

It's a debt collection agency. They've bought my debt at a discount, and the stressed, harrassed clerk who delivers these mock frightening letters to the printer is being paid 15K a year to meet "targets" in an air-conditioned office lit by flickering flourescent lights, more interested in her part in the empty dramas of female dominated workplaces.

I always answer debt collectors' letters; I never reply to their phone calls. I keep copies of everything, in both directions. I offer five pounds a month--my pre-noon daily drink budget--in polite and blank prose. I thank them for every letter, however red the ink, safe in the knowledge that a court would look sympathetically at my propertyless situation, with an income that the HMRC after a bit of fiddling certified recently at 7375/year.

I bumped into my old music teacher, Edward, who took me all through my ABRSM exams, playing by sight my piano piece that was a juvenile arrangement of a Scottish reel. I had just discovered, in Walter Piston's peerless textbook on harmony, that Schubert once modulated, in a single chord, across a bar line, from C major to A flat. That's very rare. Piston cites it as a signal towards the end of what musicologists call the Common Practice Period (which never was).

I was coming up to my exams, so I copied it, an epigone after a Master, to go from B flat to G flat in my arrangement of The Blackthorn Bush. I still remember that class. Edward, concentrating intently on the briskly energetic tempo, jerked his head forward as we lurched to G flat, thinking "Fuck! Six flats! And only a // pause to do it in!" ("//" means a pause of short but indefinite duration). I was hoping he'd ask me where I got the idea of modulating down a major third in order to sound more learned than I was (nothing new there) but I can't remember him asking me.

We stood in the queue together, chatting. I'm going to Glasgow in early May to get pissed and hear the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra play Bruckner's Seventh. "Overwhelming climaxes," it promises on the orchestra's website. I'd love to ask him along, but I didn't, stifled with the embarrassment of not knowing whether I now know him well enough to suggest several hours together. It wouldn't be awkward on my side. He's a lovely man and I've got a great deal to thank him for, which I never say for fear it will sound awkward in its expression.

It was my turn to host the book group tonight. I went to get a tenner out and it said I only have £1.38. My peculatory gains have been spent or sent to Italy for the holiday. Then the tardy postman arrived with a letter and a fiver from my Mum.

With things I already had in the house, the food was sorted. Delia Smith's "Moroccan" salad (couscous, hard boiled eggs, sundried tomatoes, olives, rocket, grilled yellow pepper, cherry tomatoes, garlicky dressing), baby potatoes in soured cream, Martha Rose Shulman's cheese pastries made from Bowland Organic Lancashire and Parmesan.

But no wine and no coal. Coal is expensive and takes several days to be delivered. I rang Niall, who's in the book group. "Hiya Niall. Feel a bit awkward about this but I'm a bit strapped for cash, very strapped actually. I was just wondering if you could buy a bottle of red and one of white and bring them round, and I can see you right on Monday." Niall apologised, "You know I would if I could."

I texted Kirsty. "I'm sorry to ask you this but I was just wondering if you might be able to led me £10 until tomorrow. It's just that I'm hosting the book group tonight and I haven't got anything to give them to eat." Lying a bit.

Kirsty shook her head as she gave me a tenner. I enjoyed making the food, talking to myself with the luxury of no-one else in the house. I laid out the table with cutlery and crockery. It looked attractive and colourful. Blue fairy lights over the fireplace, tea lights in frosted purple glasses. "This looks cosy," said Niall as he walked in, which made me have a little swell of pride as a host. They woofed the food, another compliment. Hardly anything left. The book was my choice, as host, so we discussed William H Gass's Omensetter's Luck which I first came across from its enthusiastic advocacy on An und für sich

Chatting in the kitchen (heating blazing away), Stefan was inviting me out to the seaside resort on the Adriatic coast whence he hails. He surprised me by mentioning that he owns three flats there, which, he said, can net 50,000 USD during the summer. The thought of spending a week with Stefan has not the slightest appeal, but in the usual cowardly English way, I made the politely appropriate responses. A few hours later, it had all soured.

I arrive home to find Stefan turning over a letter he's opened. That's addressed to me. Do I go through your post? My heart sinks to see that it's the electricity and gas bill.

"It's not so high," he says, showing me the figure of £218. "No, that's wrong," I say. "No, that's estimated. It's higher than that. I'll take the readings and get a new bill." He didn't understand about estimated bills. "It's a guess," I said, trying to explain. "It's for gas?" he replied.

There then followed an infuriating fifteen minutes in which he argued first that we should only pay £218 because they didn't come round to read the meter, before deploying a ridiculous bit of sophistry where he said that we were paying too much if I gave them the readings now, since that would be the reading on 22nd, not the 15th, the date of the bill.

I took the readings and phoned them through. They were much higher than on the bill of course, given his dedication to changing England's climate to that of Chad by Christmas, and in the meantime, simulating Saharan conditions here at 17 Acacia Avenue. I held the line for several minutes to the company, feeling tense and awkward.

The clerk said the actual figure would be around £421. Four hundred fucking quid. It used to be about 70 when I lived here by myself. And yes, I realise that most people wouldn't sit with a gas ring on in the kitchen rather than turn the heating on, or wrap themselves up for a night's reading with a duvet and a snuggly blanky, but he is more egregiously profligate than I am frugal.

Again, back came an argument about only paying £218. The folly of deferring the extra £200 missed him.

Thankfully, Csilla, with her better English and diplomacy, arrived to mediate. They disappeared for some secret consultation upstairs then came down asking if we had to pay it by 6th March. "Not dead on - there's a couple of weeks' leeway in that." I drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly and didn't enjoy them.

I had made a delicious onion soup from a much used cookery book by Martha Rose Shulman, its desiccated spine unable to hold the segmented book together. Blood red and luxuriously rich in flavour, with caraway, thyme, red wine and rum; half way to being a stew. I had cheese on toast to go with it, proper sunflower and pumpkin seed bread from our new proper bakery and proper organic Lancashire cheese. Looking down at it, I resented Stefan for tinging my lovely soup with unpleasantness over money, made worse by him refusing to acknowledge that he is responsible for the great majority of that bill.

This morning, absolutely nothing has been learned. According to the Met Office website it is now 10 degrees C in Lancaster. You do not need the heating on when it is 10 degrees outside. At 10 degrees, you have two options: an extra jumper, or the pub. And yet, its costly dim white noise courses through the house.

I had a letter from my former Uni yesterday gently reminding me that I need to ask [redacted] for a Leavers Form, so that we can formalise my exit from the PhD. Redacted Woman is very attractive, as the administrative cadre in tertiary education tends to be. I first met her at my boozy first day at Leeds, when I ended up pissed and fast asleep at Manchester Airport station, being prodded awake by the conductor, just making the last train back from the airport, and arriving shamefaced to stumble into Kirsty's house, drunk, two hours late, to babysit. Our friend

The LRB arrived this morning and I sprang to attention on seeing an advert at the back for a talk by Jacques Rancière at the University of London next month. My former supervisor was quite keen on Rancière and the next stage in our professional relationship (had I not made some career-wrecking drunken pass at him at some point, alcohol running like a ) would have been to resist articulately his desire to shift my PhD towards the Continental airyfairyness of the French towards the English empiricism of people who have worked on the railways and